The renowned
biographer’s unforgettable portrait of a family in ruins—his own

Meet the Baileys: Burck, a prosperous lawyer once voted the
American Legion’s “Citizen of the Year” in his tiny hometown of Vinita,
Oklahoma; his wife Marlies, who longs to recapture her festive life in
Greenwich Village as a fetching young German immigrant, fresh off the boat; their
addled son Scott, who repeatedly crashes the family Porsche; and Blake, the younger
son, trying to find a way through the storm. “You’re gonna be just like me,” a
drunken Scott taunts him. “You’re gonna be worse.”

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Blake Bailey has been hailed as “addictively
readable” (New York Times) and praised for his ability to capture lives
“compellingly and in harrowing detail” (Time). The Splendid Things We
Planned is his darkly funny account of growing up in the shadow of an
erratic and increasingly dangerous brother, an exhilarating and sometimes
harrowing story that culminates in one unforgettable Christmas.

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Quotes & Awards

“This fine and haunting memoir touches the spot where family,
responsibility, and helplessness converge. It’s not a pretty place, but
boy has Blake Bailey made it memorable. The Splendid Things We Planned is as forceful and revealing as any of the author’s excellent biographies, and that’s really saying something.”

David Sedaris

“An extraordinary memoir, written with the love and rage of
a brother and son and controlled with the skill of a master biographer.”

Geoff Dyer, National Book Critics Circle Award winner

“Enthralling…Achingly honest…A fearless, deeply felt, and often
frightening book…[The Splendid Things We Planned] arrives at a certain
undeniable truth about how we are capable of feeling love for people we would
never choose to be around.”

New York Times Book Review

“The book brings a
surprising degree of humor and frankness to describing some of the most
humiliating moments in its author’s life…A sleek, dramatic, authentically lurid story fueled
by candid fraternal rivalry.”

New York Times

“Vibrantly
evocative and car-crash engrossing.”

Entertainment Weekly

“Perhaps celebrated biographer Blake Bailey’s
fascination with the secret lives of others has its roots in his own colorful
family tree; his memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait,
suggests it’s so.”

Vanity Fair

“Very entertaining [and] immensely enjoyable—but also profoundly,
persuasively sad. Like Mary Karr or David Sedaris, Bailey doesn’t try to
manufacture an answer to the questions posed by his family’s failings.”

Elle

“Manages to do justice to the tedium of chronic dysfunction without
becoming tedious itself…Compelling because of Bailey’s emotional acuity as well
as his wit, which emerges as an adaptive coping mechanism—a way to survive
despair by streaking it with light.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“[Told with] scathing honesty…grotesque and grimly funny…[Bailey’s]
struggle as a writer looking for truth and as a brother and son looking for
catharsis gives the book an unsettling urgency…its specific story, about a
family spinning out of control, naturally points to wider, shared experience
and pushes us to consider what we owe our parents, siblings, and children—and
what they owe us in return.”

NewYorker.com

“A haunting portrait of more than one tortured soul and a
heartfelt probing of the limits of brotherly love.”

Booklist (starred review)

“It seems fitting that biographer Bailey tells the story of his own life
by chronicling his brother Scott’s alcoholism and drug addiction…[His]
story captures the contradictions and tensions that simmer just below
the surface of the family…and Bailey tells it wonderfully, in a
tragicomic tone that slowly reveals the true depths to which his older
brother has sunk.”

Publishers Weekly

“Bailey’s memoir is a more genteel, though no less accomplished, update
of Harry Crews’s A Childhood, with details layered in an unflinching
fusillade until a poignant, maddening portrait of Scott—and the rest of
the Baileys, seen through the lens of Scott’s descent—takes shape. The
effect of the writing and Bailey’s own wrestling with time, memory, and
loss lingers after the final passages.”

Library Journal

“A brother’s lament, a hard-won, clear-eyed view of one
family’s tortured history, The Splendid Things We Planned is everything
we hope for in a modern memoir. Blake Bailey’s triumph here is both personal
and literary: a beautiful book, rising out of the ruins.”

Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Devotion

“Blake Bailey is the closest thing we have to a modern-day
Richard Ellmann. How unexpected, but also how utterly perfect, that one of our
best literary biographers now reveals the gripping true-life novel at the core
of his own experience.”

Tom Bissell, award-winning author of Magic Hours

“One of the most sensitive, intelligent, and affecting books
I’ve read in a long time. The Splendid Things We Planned is the
story of an American family, and of two sons whose lives went in very different
directions, and though a memoir, it is, perhaps unsurprisingly,
reminiscent of the fiction of Bailey’s former subjects Richard Yates and John
Cheever in its compassion, its lack of sentimentality, and the rich, detailed
prose in which it is written.”

Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

A New York Times Editor’s Choice

Nominated for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography

Other Titles by Blake Bailey:

About the Author

Blake Bailey is the author of award-winning biographies of
John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He is the recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the
Francis Parkman Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in
Virginia, where he is the Mina Hohenberg Darden Professor of Creative Writing
at Old Dominion University.

About the Narrator

Jim Meskimen is a stage, film, and television actor who has appeared in many well-known movies and television shows. He acted in Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon for director Ron Howard, both of which were nominated for Best Picture Oscars. His television appearances include The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Friends, Lie to Me, Criminal Minds, and Parks and Recreation. He is also a painter, award-winning audiobook narrator, and audiobook director for Galaxy Audio.

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